Digital long‐term archiving – how to keep your assets valuable

Gerhard Schneider (University of Freiburg, Germany)

long term preservation of digital data faces several challenges. Storage media have a restricted life expectancy due to the deterioration of media but also due to the technical progress which may turn hardware based reading devices obsolete. A continuous copy process onto modern storage media is therefore necessary. But in many cases, data also requires software for display, evaluation or processing. The necessary software, once running on old computer systems, may no longer be executable on modern systems. It is therefore vital to preserve the old environment including executable software in a way that it can be run on modern machines. The talk will describe a fully functional solution to this problem.